My article on Bangkok’s Kitsch Cat is in the newest issue of Theme Magazine.

Read article online at Theme or in the vault.

If you haven’t already heard the cats and their brand of 80s pop madness, check out their packed site, download some special tracks (and a mix over on Asian Man Dan), and keep up with their blog (including obligatory MJ Tribute). Also you can order the CD/shirt no matter how far away you live from the BTS…

(Cyndi Seui, one of the beat wizards behind Kitsch Cat, performing in Bangkok, 2007)

Title: “Kitsch Cat is the Cat’s Meow”
Publication: Theme Magazine
Date: Fall 2009
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Take a quick spin through Siam Square or Chatuchak Market and it’s clear: Bangkok’s youth culture knows how to do retro. From deadstock sunglasses to modernist furniture, the past is not only present, but lovingly curated and feverishly consumed. The cool kids behind the Kitsch Cat project, however, are taking an obsession with a previous decade (namely the ’80s) to a whole new level.

Kitsch Cat was born a year ago when Thai electro-pop fixture Cesar B. De Guzman (aka Cyndi Seui) and graphic designer/musician Peera Suk-a-Suk (aka Yuri’s Nominee) began brainstorming on a music collaboration—something personal and separate from their day-jobs at indie label Smallroom Records. Soon their friend Jaree Thanapura (aka Gramaphone Children) joined in, and over weekly dinners at a Thonglor ramen joint, the concept evolved: a mini-label to push the electronic music envelope, through compilations, T-shirt design, a blog, and any other means necessary.

“We didn’t expect it to come out so ’80s,” Thanapura explains, “but it ended up that everyone was doing something relating to ’80s music, and it just snapped into place… kinda like velcro.” Velcro is cited as an influence in the liner notes of the first CD compilation, alongside “8-bit video games, vinyl toys, Rubik’s cubes, calculator watches, and spandex.”

The six artists on the compilation remix their reference points into something fresh. Juicy synths and shiny horns are chopped almost beyond recognition in D.J.S.C.P’s dense composition, while Gramaphone Children’s “One Pink Saturday” is a tweaked John Hughes film theme song. The King of Pop is alive and well in Cyndi Seui’s tracks, cross-shuffled and sped up for an impatient age.

After the CD’s release last fall, Kitsch Cat won admirers in France, Japan, and beyond (swamping De Guzman with lots of remix work for electro acts like Astrolabe and Freaku). Ironically, the local scene is discovering them from the outside-in, through international music blogs. Meanwhile the Cats are working on upcoming live shows, the next CD compilation and corresponding T-shirt, and perhaps even a custom-designed “Kitsch Cat” effects filter. Their grand plans to “create electro madness on the dance floor” are well under way.

I later realized that on a trip in 2007, I had hung out for an entire afternoon under this same bridge while some friends were filming. It was lovely – fried fish from the barbecue stand, little dogs and teen skateboarders zigzagging past each other, and at 6pm sharp, the requisite group aerobics. But at the time, the tranquility freaked me out slightly because it reminded me of the riverbank scene from Bong Joon-Ho’s “The Host” (”Gwoemul”), right before the monster surges out of the water. Now, unfortunately, Rama VIII is temporarily tinted with a more genuine creepiness.

Beijing was still covered in snow when I left, and grey when I returned. Just like “The Wizard of Oz,” BKK remains the Technicolor in the middle.

Full photo set here.

Profile: Ourself Beside Me, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Theme: Dreamchaser, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Title: “Dreamchaser”
Publication: Theme Magazine
Date: Dec/Jan 2008/2009
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Vientiane is a sleepy city on the scale of Southeast Asian capitals, and even quieter in the days following Pi Mai (the Lao New Year).

Still, on this balmy April evening, there are plenty of motorbikes, scooters, and other two-wheel vehicles zooming around the Patuxai Arch and down Avenue Lan Xang. Some carry three generations of one family, others a daredevil load of everything and the kitchen sink (sometimes literally).

Two of the riders purposefully follow a pick-up truck with a cameraman standing in the back; he carefully films their every swerve. Also crammed into the bed are a boom-guy and a petite woman with a walkie-talkie (the producer). They roar their way back to the small house serving as their base camp, where the rest of the team waits with the rest of the gear, going over the next day’s route. They’re all exhausted, but filled with the calm energy of people doing exactly what they want to be doing.

This little caravan is the rolling set of “Dreamchaser,” an unconventional travel/documentary show for Thai television focused on a man, a motorcycle, and his search for inspiring people and experiences. Their second season took them from Bangkok to Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and back home again, and though they now have corporate sponsors, the spirit is still pure DIY. What separates this show from typical “on the road” reality TV fare is that it’s a bit of a creative dream for all involved.

The easy rider behind it all is Kamol Sukosol Clapp, aka “Sukie”, age 37, indie-rock impressario turned bike-loving adventurer. Born in Bangkok to a Thai mother and American father but raised partially in the States, Sukie’s fate was sealed when he heard ACDC’s “Highway to Hell” at age 12; he then asked his mother to buy him an electric guitar. In his early twenties, he and a few friends founded a record label called Bakery Music; the first indie label in Thailand, the first to sign acts like grunge rockers Modern Dog and pioneering MC Joey Boy, and the first to profit off of the explosion of the indie sound. He produced big bands and played in his own, the guitar-rock quartet Pru. “We were all young,” he recalls. “We were just kids doing what we wanted to do. We were in the right place at the right time, and it just grew and grew.”

Bakery’s growth led to it being bought by BEC-Tero/Sony BMG in 2004, at which point Sukie left the music biz. Which is when the mid-30s crisis hit. “Since I was 12 I had wanted to play music,” Sukie says, “and now I didn’t know what to do. I had no inspiration, no passion.” After six months of aimlessness, his friend suggested he get out of Bangkok for a while. So he bought a motorcycle and began riding around the countryside. In typical Sukie fashion, “one thing led to another,” and soon a TV show/cultural phenomenon was born.

The idea for the first season was simple: to motorcycle around Thailand, meeting interesting people who are following their dreams, such as the leader of an upcountry elephant sanctuary, or a young doctor on a small southern island who moonlights as a hipster-novelist. Maybe Sukie would stumble into his own next passion in the process. “It’s called Dreamchaser because I’m looking for my next dream,” he says. “I hoped the audience can watch it and be inspired to follow their own dream too.”

Sukie knew nothing about executive producing and hosting a television show, but luckily he had a good friend to bring along for the ride. “Dreamchaser” director Aditya “Juke” Assarat is a childhood friend of Sukie’s—and also happens to be one of Thailand’s most promising emerging filmmakers. After a similar youth spent in both Bangkok and the States, Assarat attended USC film school, and then became the first Thai filmmaker invited to the Sundance Directors Lab. He was also hand-picked by Mira Nair for a special Rolex mentorship on the strength of his quietly luminous shorts (one is presciently titled Motorcycle) and could have easily stayed in Los Angeles to go for the indie/Hollywood gold. Instead, he returned to Bangkok to work on quirkier projects, like the experimental collaboration Three Friends, assorted shorts, and a concert documentary for Sukie’s band Pru. He also set up Pop Pictures with friends/producers Soros Sukhum and Jetnipith Teerakulchanyut, with the aim of developing and shooting his first fiction feature Wonderful Town, as well as taking on other interesting projects and some commercial work to keep the machinery going.

When Sukie came to him with “Dreamchaser,” Assarat jumped right in. “‘Dreamchaser’ was my introduction to the TV business,” Assarat says. “None of the people involved in the show had ever done anything for TV before. So the first season was sort of learn-as-you-go.”

That first season saw Assarat and his steadfast crew of Pop Pictures collaborators trucking around the Thai countryside, following Sukie as he sped along rural routes, meeting with dreamers of all stripes, and generally enjoying life on the road.

Assarat compares the experience of directing “Dreamchaser” to a musical “jam session”—“All the previous plans go out the window and you mostly work in the moment; it’s very fresh and liberating, especially compared to making a movie, which is more constructed, story-boarded, and planned ahead of time.” The style reflects this—a breezy combination of vérité observation, interviews with featured guests, scenes of Sukie in traveler-mode, the occasional spill, and wild, unscripted moments, all guided by his casual narration and, of course, plenty of road tunes. “My background in music doesn’t really effect the TV show at all, other than making sure we have a damn good soundtrack!” Sukie laughs.

In spring of 2007, the finished program premiered on TITV, and seemed to strike a chord with the audience. Soon, on every upcountry trip he took, Sukie encountered average Thais who always asked the same question: Will there be a Season Two?

In the meantime, he released his memoir about the Bakery years (entitled Bakery & I) and waited for his director. Toward the end of 2007, Assarat’s Wonderful Town debuted on the festival circuit to acclaim, winning prizes from Pusan to Rotterdam. The spare drama follows a city architect coming to a small town hit hard by the 2004 tsunami, and the private confrontations he finds there. Wonderful Town shows a thoughtful auteur at work, with touches reminiscent of Tsai Ming-Liang and Assarat’s countryman Apichatpong Weerasethakul—seemingly lightyears away from the revved-up fun of “Dreamchaser.” Which might be one reason he went back for a second helping.

For “Dreamchaser 2”, Sukie had even bigger plans. He wanted it to be more adventurous, with a tougher riding route. He wanted to go outside the Thai borders and cover all of Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam). The first season had the occasional celebrity guest as Sukie’s riding partner—such as the half-Laotian, half-Australian heartthrob Ananda Everingham (who has been called the hardest-working actor in Thai showbusiness). This time Sukie wanted to cast an unknown as his sidekick. And they wanted the show to raise money for charity, after the great success of raising funds through Season One for an elephant sanctuary featured on one episode. In short, they wanted “Dreamchaser” to truly be a vehicle for others’ dreams as well.

Halfway through the filming of Season Two, the “Dreamchaser” gang found themselves in Vientiane, having already weathered food poisoning in Vietnam and a police-escorted journey through the notoriously dangerous “Pink Route” between Bangkok and Mae Sot, among other surprises. There they visited Makphet, a bright and airy restaurant run by Friends International as a training kitchen for former street youth. Sukie joined in the kitchen for a bit as the kids got to work, and later sampled their curries and salads in the dining room. In other stops like Mae Jam, Hoa Binh, and Phnom Penh, they also shot innovative charity and community projects like dams and schools, balancing a social consciousness with the moments of pure adventure.

Riding alongside Sukie the whole way was Hui, the son of fruit farmers from Loei in Northern Thailand who was fresh out of his compulsory army service. He had been selected from an open call of over 200 people, just because he loved riding bikes and didn’t know what to do next with his life. Sukie sees himself as a sort of big-brother to Hui, and even expresses concern about his transition back to “real life.” “He’s loving it. I’m just a bit worried how he’ll adjust after the show, because he says ‘This is what I want to do, ride all day,’ and I think, ‘Well, you have to work, too.’”

Of course, Sukie is the enviable case who appears to have accomplished both in one stroke. Assarat feels as if he’s lucked out as well, but takes on various projects to keep Pop Pictures going and his staff in their jobs. “My life is balanced quite nicely between my films, where I am the director, and various other TV and commercial jobs, where often I am not the director. It’s the second category that keeps everyone employed.”

“Dreamchaser,” now picked up by the bigger Thai TV network Channel 3, is a perfect blend. “‘Dreamchaser’ is the project that everybody most looks forward to every year,” says Assarat. “It’s a two-month long road trip, visiting different places, doing crazy things; who wouldn’t want to be a part of it?” Indeed, for two months the Bangkok hipster kids of Pop Pictures get to transform into a scruffy but efficient unit of guerrilla creativity, bumping along the superhighways and jungle roads: three trucks, two motorcycles, two DV cameras, one mini-camera, one spy-camera, one high-megapixel digital camera, one boom and sound system (hooked up to a perpetually chain-smoking soundman in a vintage t-shirt), helmets, walkie-talkies, cellphones, and backpacks—most adorned with stickers of the retro monkey-face “Dreamchaser” logo. Then, of course, they return to the city for the hard work of editing all that footage.

“Dreamchaser 2” premiered in June, but this year went beyond just the TV set. The website is expanding with nearly 600 members registered only a few weeks after its launch, and books, DVDs, and bike-rallies are in the pipeline. In August, a large charity concert featuring old Bakery bands like Modern Dog helped raise nearly $9 million Thai Baht ($260,000 USD), and of course, some discussion about Season Three has begun. “We are considering Beijing to Istanbul, but it will require a lot of planning time and financing,” Sukie says. Also, rising star Assarat needs to schedule it around his next feature, a slightly personal tale of a US-raised Bangkok boy returning home, entitled High Society and starring the tireless Ananda Everingham.

The question remains: Has Sukie found his next dream after all? “I feel very fortunate to be doing what I’m doing,” he reflects, but cites a lesson he learned from the music industry: not to compromise himself or his artistic integrity too much, and to always keep it fun. “I want to take ‘Dreamchaser’ as far as I can but not to the point where it becomes too big and I am no longer in control of it, but it’s in control of me.” If ever that is the case, Sukie will probably just speed off into the sunset, chasing the next dream, and creating something undeniably special in the process.

Title: “Critic’s Picks: Tomyam Pladib”
Publication: Artforum Online
Date: May 2008
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“Tomyam Pladib”
JIM THOMPSON ART CENTER
Jim Thompson House, 6 Soi Kasemsan 2, Rama 1 Road,
March 19–June 5

Organized by Gridthiya Gaweewong, founder of Project 304 and curator, with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, of 2006’s beleaguered exhibition “Saigon Open City,” “Tomyam Pladib” brings together Thai artists who love Japan and vice versa. The title, inspired by a magazine column by Bangkok-based Japanese writer Ryota Suzuki, refers to an imaginary fusion of Thai spicy soup and Japanese sashimi. Luckily, the included artists resist such binary combinations.

A restaging of Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Everyone Likes Someone as You Like Someone, 2008, spills across half the gallery with its delightful, “relational” futon mountain, within which kids are encouraged to deposit their personal drawings, playing on an abstract notion of exchange. Comic wunderkind Wisut Ponnimit, now a star in his adopted country of Japan, teams up with Vachiraporn Limviphuvadh on an interactive animation piece in which viewers must don minimalist clothing to play a lo-fi video game. Similarly evoking this sense of a cultural “second skin” are kimonos by textile artist Jarupatcha Achavasmit, who weaves traditional Thai ikat into Japanese designs. A set of familiar Yoshitomo Nara drawings and Morimura Yasumasa’s gender-bending, uncanny photographs, including a homage to Frida Kahlo, are perhaps most interesting for the clearly Thai names of collectors on the wall labels—unintentionally referencing how one country “collects” another, anywhere on the spectrum from fandom to colonization.

The literal jewel of the show is a new video installation by well-known film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Titled Morakot (Emerald), 2007, its slow interior shots of a defunct hotel are overlaid with ghostly voices and CGI dust motes, creating a strange, melancholy energy. The piece has little to do with Japan, but that’s part of the point: The simple juxtaposition expands and expands, just like Weerasethakul’s virtual dust, lighter than air but full of a complex history.

Title: “This Old House″
Publication: South China Morning Post
Date: Aug 2007
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A Thai film has audiences jumping out of their skins, writes Samantha Culp

In the Thai horror movie Alone, an old-fashioned Thai wooden house replaces the classic gothic mansion as the setting for secrets, betrayal and things that go bump in the night. But this isn’t your average haunted house film. It’s the second collaboration between Banjong Pisanthanakun and Parkpoom Wongpoom, the directing duo behind surprise hit Shutter (2004). Like its predecessor, it delights in pushing the boundaries of the scary movie.

The protagonist, a young woman named Ploy (played by pop star Marsha Wattanapanich), starts believing that her dead sister, Pim, is still with her – literally. Born as conjoined twins, they were separated as children, but only Ploy survived the operation. Now, after years living in Seoul, Ploy is called back to Bangkok, when her mother suffered a stroke.

Accompanied by her sym-pathetic boyfriend, Wee (Vittaya Wasukraipaisan), Ploy is forced to confront her tormented past in the creaking hallways and melancholy darkness of the old house. What she finds is one scare after another, but also some deeper, odder truths that go beyond the typical horror fare.

Experimentation is nothing new to the film’s producer, Mingmongkol Sonakul, whose refusal to differentiate between popular and art-house cinema has made her one of the most interesting figures in contemporary Thai film during the past decade. She’s one of the few in Thailand working with an independent production company. ‘I never think, ‘What’s the relationship between indie and mainstream?” Mingmongkol says. ‘Just as I would never ask, ‘What’s the relation between short and tall people?”

Born and raised in Bangkok, Mingmongkol studied film at the San Francisco Art Institute, and worked as an intern at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When she returned home, her father asked what she planned to do. When she told him she wanted to make films, he said, ‘It’s impossible – people don’t do that here.’

At this point, the Thai film industry was in a slump. Regardless, Mingmongkol teamed up with another Thai who had studied overseas, and produced his first feature film. It was a low-budget, black-and-white journey through Thailand asking people to imagine the next episode in a surreal story. It blurred fact and fiction into something strange and beautiful. The film was Mysterious Object at Noon (1998) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and one of the first important works of the so-called Thai New Wave.
Mingmongkol then went on to produce other milestone indie works such as Pimpaka Towira’s One Night Husband and Aditya Assarat’s short film Motorcycle.

But she also wanted to get back behind the camera. In 2002, she directed I-San Special, a surreal Brechtian experiment set aboard a night bus rattling through the countryside. She says it’s an ‘experimental film, but quite entertaining’. Mixing theatricality and documentary, I-San Special follows the passengers on and off the bus as they act out a popular radio soap opera, and comments on postmodern contradictions of everyday Thai life. The film was shown at festivals and won prizes, including the Dragon & Tigers Award at the Vancouver International Film Festival. It also had local resonance because of its vernacular subject matter.

Mingmongkol says piracy and distribution difficulties are major problems for the Thai industry. They were such problems for I-San Special that she she started seeking new ways to distribute, especially for her own projects.

In 2005, Mingmongkol co-directed 3 Friends with Aditya Assarat and Pumin Chinaradee, a twist on reality TV and the ubiquitous starlet-exploitation VCDs sold across Thailand. It follows a young actress and her friends stuck on an island during a video shoot. With improvised dialogue, the cast blend reality and performance into an uncanny experience. After its festival run, Mingmongkol tried selling the film online.
Another major issue for the development of Thai film is a limited market for the avant-garde. Because most Thais are below the poverty level, ‘they can afford to see only one film a year. So when they go to a film, they want entertainment.’

Some of Mingmongkol’s more recent productions, such as Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s enigmatic ‘tropical noir’ Invisible Waves may be too challenging for local audiences. The Tin Mine, on the other hand, had wider appeal – the drama about a young urbanite’s trials at a mining camp in southern Thailand was the country’s entry for foreign language film Oscar last year.

What brought Mingmongkol to Alone was a curiosity about conjoined twins. Returning to the screen after a 15-year absence, Marsha plays both Ploy and Pim, and the story explores the mysterious bond between the twins. Alone also allowed Mingmongkol to put a spin on the overplayed cliches of Asian horror. ‘We tried to do something new,’ she says. ‘Otherwise, there’s no point in making it.’

Shutter was a big hit and show-cased a refined visual style. In Alone, that aesthetic has an even bigger canvas. The Bangkok house at the core of the story is a real house built specially for the film – and burned to the ground during the climax. Mingmongkol says she and the directors felt more comfortable dealing with real fire rather than CGI, and that the result is more realistic. Each frame looks glossy and polished, but the fire seems to lick at the smooth surfaces in a way that can’t be created by computer.

Alone was a hit in Bangkok this spring, where it was described as a worthy follow-up to Shutter. A distributor has bought the rights to release it in North America, and there are rumours of an Indian remake in the works. Shutter is also being remade in the US.
But is there anything that makes these films particularly Thai? Mingmongkol identifies the relentless nature of the scares as local. ‘If Thai people want to see a ghost film, they like to be scared sh**less,’ she says. ‘If it’s a comedy, they need to be laughing constantly. It’s like somtum [spicy papaya salad] – people just keep eating it and eating it and eating it.’ There are plenty of moments that make you jump out of your seat, but not too many to numb your thrill taste buds.

Mingmongkol continues to produce films that don’t always deliver the somtum effect. ‘I believe that each film is different,’ she says, mentioning a documentary project, as well as a pan-Asian script that she expects will take a while to develop. Perhaps the truest independents are those who don’t care for categories, and this is reflected in her tastes. ‘I like [Krzysztof] Kieslowski’s Red, White, Blue, and [Peter Greenaway's] The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover,’ she says. ‘But I also like Anaconda.’